Debian Weekly News - January 9th, 2001

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.

Linux 2.4.0 is out, and Debian has suddenly received a lot of 2.4
compatibility testing. Unstable supports the new kernel without many
difficulties. The main source of problems is devfs, and a number of bug
reports have been filed on packages that need devfs support. Testing and
stable don't quite
support the new kernel yet.

The first Debian conference (a followup to last year's zeroth
conference) is in the planning stage. More information about the
conference is on its web
page, and this mail from Thierry Laronde. It will
be held from July 4th to 9th in Bordeaux, France.

Watch out for the Debian tar SNAFU. The -I switch in Debian's tar
program makes it use bzip2 for compression. However, in unstable the -j
switch should be used instead, and -I has an altogether different meaning.
So a command such as "tar cIf ..." might compress the file with
bzip2, or it might create an uncompressed archive with
no error message, depending on the version of tar that is used. Tar's
NEWS file explains why this change was made -- compatibility with Solaris'
tar. A fix is planned: Tar's maintainer came up with a
transition plan that will make tar
output an error message when -I is used, and tar's author has
accepted the plan.

Lilo is also rather broken in unstable this week. Lilo's new maintainer
made some
large changes to the way it is configured, unfortunately the result is
that the new package
replaces
/etc/lilo.conf with an automatically generated and often broken
file. The maintainer is
working
to fix the this and related problems, but new
bug reports (and flames) keep rolling in, so it might be a while until he
has all the kinks worked out.

What's appropriate content for Debian changelogs? Since bug reports
can be automatically closed by changelog entries, there have been some
clear instances of abuse of this feature, and other cases that are more
borderline. One such case is using the changelog to close a bug report when
no changes were actually made to the package, as was done in
this glibc
changelog. Whether that is ok is debatable, and
it
was. One thing the discussion made clear is that thanks to automated bug
closing and
apt-listchanges, an increasing number of people are reading Debian
changelogs. Write them with that in mind.

Warning: source-only uploads
no
longer work now that Debian uses package pools. It might get fixed
later but for now its broken, so "Ob!Nike: Just don't do it."